The increasingly widespread adoption of technology to support collaborative work on the authoring and review of electronic content (e.g., documents, presentations, etc.) has presented to a number of technical challenges, ranging from security challenges to resolving conflicts between competing edits to content from multiple authors.
In existing collaboration systems, each user receives a copy of the content that can be viewed and modified by the user. When one user modifies the copy, every other copy of that content is also modified using operational transforms. The communication of modifications results in a sequence of versions that do not vary from copy to copy. Thus a document, through modifications, can be represented by a single, serial progression of versions.